In the Stop 'n Shop in Orleans, Massachusetts, I was struck by the elegance of the
mackerel in the fresh-fish display. They were rowed and stacked, brilliant against the
white of the crushed ice; I loved how black and glistening the bands of dark scales were,
and the prismed sheen of the patches between, and their shining flat eyes. I stood and
looked at them for a while, just paying attention while I leaned on my cart--before I
remembered where I was and realized that I was standing in someone's way.

Our metaphors go on ahead of us, they know before we do. And thank goodness for that,
for if I were dependent on other ways of coming to knowledge I think I'd be a very slow
study. I need something to serve as a container for emotion and idea, a vessel that can
hold what's too slippery or charged or difficult to touch. Will doesn't have much to do
with this; I can't choose what's going to serve as a compelling image for me. But I've
learned to trust that part of my imagination that gropes forward, feeling its way toward
what it needs; to watch for the signs of fascination, the sense of compelled attention (Look
at me, something seems to say, closely) that indicates that there's
something I need to attend to. Sometimes it seems to me as if metaphor were the advance
guard of the mind; something in us reaches out, into the landscape in front of us, looking
for the right vessel, the right vehicle, for whatever will serve.

Driving home from the grocery, I found myself thinking again about the fish, and even
scribbled some phrases on an envelope in the car, something about stained glass,
soapbubbles, while I was driving. It wasn't long--that same day? the next?--before I was
at my desk, trying simply to describe what I had seen. I almost always begin with
description, as a way of focusing on that compelling image, the poem's "given."
I know that what I can see is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg; if I do my work of
study and examination, and if I am lucky, the image which I've been intrigued by will
become a metaphor, will yield depth and meaning, will lead me to insight. The goal here is
inquiry, the attempt to get at what it is that's so interesting about what's struck me.
Because it isn't just beauty; the world is full of lovely things and that in itself
wouldn't compel me to write. There's something else, some gravity or charge to this image
that makes me need to investigate it.

Exploratory description, then; I'm a scientist trying to measure and record what's
seen. The first two sentences of the poem attempt sheer observation, but by the second's
list of tropes (abalone, soapbubble skin, oil on a puddle) it's clear to me that these
descriptive terms aren't merely there to chronicle the physical reality of the object.
Like all descriptions, they reflect the psychic state of the observer; they aren't
"neutral," though they might pretend to be, but instead suggest a point of view,
a stance toward what is being seen. In this case one of the things suggested by these
tropes is interchangeability; if you've seen one abalone shell or prismy soapbubble or
psychedelic puddle, you've seen them all.

And thus my image began to unfold for me, in the evidence these terms provided, and I
had a clue toward the focus my poem would take. Another day, another time in my life, the
mackerel might have been metaphor for something else; they might have served as the crux
for an entirely different examination. But now I began to see why they mattered for this
poem; and the sentence that follows commences the poem's investigative process:

Splendor, and splendor,
and not a one in any way

distinguished from the other
--nothing about them
of individuality.

There's a terrific kind of exhilaration for me at this point in the unfolding of a
poem, when a line of questioning has been launched, and the work has moved from evocation
to meditation. A direction is coming clear, and it bears within it the energy that the
image contained for me in the first pace. Now, I think, we're getting down to it. This
élan carried me along through two more sentences, one that considers the fish as
replications of the ideal, Platonic Mackerel, and one that likewise imagines them as the
intricate creations of an obsessively repetitive jeweler.

Of course my process of unfolding the poem wasn't quite this neat. There were false
starts, wrong turnings that I wound up throwing out when they didn't seem to lead
anywhere. I can't remember now, because the poem has worked the charm of its craft on my
memory; it convinces me that it is an artifact of a process of inquiry. The drama of the
poem is its action of thinking through a question. Mimicking a sequence of perceptions and
meditation, it tries to make us think that this feeling and thinking and knowing is taking
place even as the poem is being written. Which, in a way, it is --just not this
neatly or seamlessly! A poem is always a made version of experience.

Also, needless to say, my poem was full of repetitions, weak lines, unfinished phrases
and extra descriptions, later trimmed, I like to work on a computer, because I can type
quickly, put everything in, and still read the results later on, which isn't always true
of my handwriting. I did feel early on that the poem seemed to want to be a
short-lined one, I liked breaking the movement of these extended sentences over the
clipped line, and the spotlight-bright focus the short line puts on individual terms felt
right. "Iridescent, watery," for instance, pleased me as a line-unit, as did
this stanza:

Short lines underline sonic textures, heightening tension. The short a's of prismatics
and abalone ring more firmly, as do the o's of abalone, rainbowed
and soapbubble. The rhyme of mirror and sphere at beginning and end of line
engages me, and I'm also pleased by the way in which these short lines slow the poem down,
parceling it out as it were to the reader, with the frequent pauses introduced by the
stanza breaks between tercets adding lots of white space, a meditative pacing.

And there, on the jeweler's bench, my poem seemed to come to rest, though it was clear
there was more to be done. Some further pressure needed to be placed on the poem's
material to force it to yield its depths. I waited a while, I read it over. Again, in what
I had already written, the clues contained in image pushed the poem forward.

Soul, heaven . . . The poem had already moved into the realm of theology, but
the question that arose ("Suppose we could iridesce . . .") startled me
nonetheless, because the notion of losing oneself "entirely in the universe/ of
shimmer" referred both to these fish and to something quite other, something
overwhelmingly close to home. The poem was written some six months after my partner of a
dozen years had died of AIDS, and of course everything I wrote--everything I saw--was
informed by that loss, by the overpowering emotional force of it. Epidemic was the central
fact of the community in which I lived. Naively, I hadn't realized that my mackerel were
already of a piece with the work I'd been writing for the previous couple of years--poems
that wrestled, in one way or another, with the notion of limit, with the line between
being someone and no one. What did it mean to be a self, when that self would be lost? To
praise the collectivity of the fish, their common iden-tity as "flashing
participants," is to make a sort of anti-elegy, to suggest that what matters is
perhaps not our individual selves but our brief soldiering in the broad streaming school
of humanity--which is composed of us, yes, but also goes on without us.

The one of a kind, the singular, like my dear lover, cannot last.

And yet the collective life, which is also us, shimmers on.

Once I realized the poem's subject-beneath-the-subject, the final stanzas of the poem
opened swiftly out from there. The collective momentum of the fish is such that even death
doesn't seem to still rob its forward movement; the singularity of each fish more or less
doesn't really exist, it's "all for all," like the Three Musketeers. I could not
have considered these ideas "nakedly," without the vehicle of mackerel to help
me think about human identity. Nor, I think, could I have addressed these things without a
certain playfulness of tone, which appeared first in the archness of "oily
fabulation" and the neologism of "iridesce." It's the blessed permission
distance gives that allows me to speak of such things at all; a little comedy can also
help to hold terrific anxiety at bay. Thus the "rainbowed school/ and its acres of
brilliant classrooms" is a joke, but one that's already collapsing on itself, since
what is taught there--the limits of "me"--is our hardest lesson. No verb is
singular because it is the school that acts, or the tribe, the group, the species; or
every verb is singular because the only I there is is a we.

The poem held one more surprise for me, which was the final statement--it came as a bit
of a shock, actually, and when I'd written it I knew I was done. It's a formulation of the
theory that the poem has been moving toward all along: that our glory is not our
individuality (much as we long for the Romantic self and its private golden heights) but
our commonness. I do not like this idea. I would rather be one fish, sparkling in my own
pond, but experience does not bear this out. And so I have tried to convince myself, here,
that beauty lies in the whole and that therefore death, the loss of the part, is not so
bad--is in, fact, almost nothing. What does our individual disappearance mean--or our
love, or our desire--when, as the Marvelettes put it, "There's too many fish in the
sea . . . ?"

I find this consoling, strangely, and maybe that's the best way to think of this
poem--an attempt at cheering oneself up about the mystery of being both an individual and
part of a group, an attempt on the part of the speaker in the poem (me) to convince
himself that losing individuality, slipping into the life of the world, could be a good
thing. All attempts to console ourselves, I believe, are doomed, because the world is more
complicated than we are. Our explanations will fail, but it is our human work to make
them. And my beautiful fish, limited though they may be as parable, do help me; they are
an image I return to in order to remember, in the face of individual erasures, the
burgeoning, good, common life. Even after my work of inquiry, my metaphor may still know
more than I do; the bright eyes of those fish gleam on, in memory, brighter than what I've
made of them.

A Display of Mackerel

They lie in parallel rows,
on ice, head to tail,
each a foot of luminosity